The #1 Money Habit Most People NEVER Do | Scott Galloway

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I think almost everything we do is an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old. Who owns homes, makes money selling stocks? People my age. Who rents and makes money with current income? People your age.

What do you tell a young person today?

I can get you rich. That's the good news. Find something you're good at. People say to follow your passion. I think that's bullsh— You got to develop a savings muscle. Then the final thing where I really screwed up was the— Oof. Follow this pattern. You're going to be economically fine.

Scott is fascinating. Made millions, hundreds of millions even. Lost hundreds of millions and has played this game of wealth incredibly well. He's willing to tell the ridiculously hard truths on both sides of the coin and then back it up with a massive amount of data. So without further ado, Scott Galloway.

Get used to rejection. Most people aren't willing to endure rejection. I've started 9 companies. 4 have failed, 3 are tie, 2 were hits. All you need is one. We are producing way too few economically and emotionally viable men. They're not going to college, dating. The result is Loneliness. I think the biggest threats to our society aren't climate change or even income inequality. I think it's, one, extremism, and two, I think it's loneliness.

Let's talk about another boom, because I don't think the average person realizes what's happened right underneath our nose.

We have allowed so much concentration of power that the rents they can charge on consumers go up every year.

I think there's a lot that can be done to make small business and bring down the costs for regular consumers who I think one of the best TED Talks I've ever seen from you recently about stealing from the youth to give to the old in this country. What do you think's happening and how did we get where we are today?

Well, the D in democracy is working a little bit too well, and that is old people have figured out they can vote themselves more money and people your age don't vote in the same kind of, I don't know, the same volume. So The incumbents will blame it on things like network effects or globalization, but there has been a purposeful transfer of wealth from young to old over the last 40 years. The tax code's gone from 400 pages to 4,000, and those 3,600 pages aren't there to help the young and the middle class. They're to transfer money from people your age to my age. So some specific examples, the largest capital transfer in history happens every year. It's called Social Security. People your age, there used to be 12 of you for every one retired person. Now there's 3. And the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet gets $1.3 trillion a year in the form of Social Security. And I'm not saying we should do away with Social Security, but I don't think, you know, I shouldn't get it. There's just, it should absolutely, it should be moved back. People are living much longer. It should be means tested. Look at the two biggest tax deductions are mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and makes money selling stocks, people my age who rents and makes money with current income, people your age. And then the two things you really need to get ahead are a college education and to build kind of a future and start thinking about a family, housing. And if you look at the price of housing, $290,000 average house before COVID $410,000 now, interest rates. So I think one of the reasons that Taylor Swift is so huge is I think people have given up on saving for a house. I think the reason Airbnb and so many people are traveling like we can't afford a house. So I see it all culminates in a couple very scary stats. The average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average 40-year-old is 24%— person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. And for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't as wealthy as his or her parents were at 30, which in my opinion is a fundamental breakdown in the compact we have between us and America. And when that happens, It creates so much shame and rage that every opportunistic infection turns into full-blown pneumonia. So whether it's Me Too or the Black Lives Matter or some of the anti-Israel protests on campus, I'm not saying those aren't righteous movements with their own momentum, but there's fuel poured on everything 'cause I think young people are just pissed off.

I've never thought about that being sort of a powder keg that ignites these one-off instances, that it's like anytime you have hyperconcentration of wealth in the hands of the few, And then the many are kind of constantly on edge. That's really interesting. So is that what you also mean when you say that it's never been easier to be a billionaire, but harder to become a millionaire in this country?

I'll have 300 kids in my class at NYU Stern. In each of those classes is a billionaire, either through all 300.

Wow, really?

Not yet, but someone will be a billionaire.

Oh, I thought you meant actually. I'm like, they're getting younger.

I introduce him to her and I just call him Big B. No, but there'll be someone who'll be a billionaire either through alternative investments, probably a hedge fund, but a small chance one of them will join or start a tech company. I also think that probably about 10% of them will end up being supported by their parents. Whereas when I got outta school, it was pretty much everyone made a very good living. Some people did really well, but everyone did fairly well. So our economy's definitely become more of a Hunger Games. The Gini coefficient's gone up and some people would argue that's a good thing. We believe in winners and losers. But I would argue, and I kind of go to higher ed on this, that When I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate was 76%. I barely— and I didn't get in. I was one of the 24% that got rejected. And I applied a second time and I got in. This year it's going to be 9%. And the artificially constrained supply among the elite institutions and the kind of gestalt in America is that we want to identify a super class of freakishly remarkable kids and then turn them into billionaires, as opposed to trying to let in as many kids as possible and give them a shot at being millionaires. So I think the gestalt has changed a little bit in the US where we're trying, we romanticize these stories of people dropping out of school and becoming billionaires. I can guarantee every parent that 99% of your kids are not in the top 1%. And it feels like we've sort of fallen out of love with the unremarkable kids.

Yeah, I agree. I also find it shocking how big the endowments of the universities are at the same time that we have education costs for universities going up so high and sort of like a declining are a lie that kids are getting from universities. What do you think about it? 'Cause you're not quiet about the things that you don't like about universities while also working in one.

Well, my industry is arguably one of the most corrupt, maybe with the exception of social media or, you know, I work in a corrupt industry. People are under the impression that we're nice people with our Labradors watching PBS every night and we're noble people. We're like everybody else. Academics and administrators wake up every morning, look in the mirror and ask themselves the same question, and that is, how do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate business strategy, and that's to sequester the majority of public from the freshman class and artificially constrain the freshman seats. So Harvard, $54 billion in endowment, it's grown its endowment 4,000% in the last 30 or 40 years, up 40-fold. It's grown its freshman class size 4%. So it admits 1,500 kids on 55,000 applicants. It has the resources. It could let in 15,000 and not sacrifice any quality, but they decide to artificially constrain it because they're, if to a certain extent, homeowners and people who already have college degrees have figured out that this LVMH rejectionist exclusionary strategy is the best way to entrench the incumbents. So if I already have a college degree and I already have a house, I love it when UCLA is impossible to get into. How many people do you say kind of proudly or jokingly say, I would never get into my college if I applied now?

A lot.

Well, that means your daughter's not getting in and it's not something to be proud of. In addition, once you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic and you start showing up to the local review board and you try and kill every every new housing permit. I bought some land to try and develop in Florida and a woman showed up at the local review board and said, I don't want them to build there 'cause that's where I walk my dog. I call that trespassing. They decided to do a study and delay their approval another 3 months. So putting housing permits or taking them out of the hands of officials and putting them in the hands of homeowners, you have absolutely no incentive to ever approve housing if you're a homeowner, 'cause an absence of new housing makes your house go up in value. An absence of elite education certification, if you already have it, skyrockets the value of your certification. So all the incentives are to make it more difficult for new entrants versus incumbents. And the ultimate example of this intergenerational theft, if you will, was COVID. And that is a million people dying from a virus would be bad, but what would be tragic is if we missed an opportunity to make my generation much wealthier. So we flushed $6 to $7 trillion into the economy under the auspices that this is a national emergency and people that need it. 85% of it wasn't spent. So 85% was saved, meaning $5 to $6 trillion was just kind of like, let's flush money into the market. So where did it end up? It went into housing and it went into the stock market. Stock market touches new highs, housing touches new highs. Great if you're me and you already own Netflix and you already own a home. Terrible if you're coming into your prime income earning years and wanna buy stocks or buy a home. The reason I'm economically secure is that in 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. And Apple, Netflix, and Amazon, just as I was coming into my prime income earning years as you are now, I was able to buy Amazon, Apple, and Netflix at $8, $10, and $12 a share. Those companies are trading at $180, $240, and $750 a share now. But now we don't ever want disruption or churn. When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of a culinary academy that wants her shot. So what you get is the credit card bill, the closest you get to the club. I'm in the club doing champagne and cocaine, you get to throw your credit card in, I run it up, the deficit is outta control and it'll be fine while I'm alive. We still have incredible creditworthiness, but by the time you're older, I mean, deficit is nothing but a tax on young people. It's a delayed tax, but it just means your interest costs are gonna be much higher when you're my age. So I think almost everything we do is an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old.

What do you say to young people listening to this that go, wow, those problems are so big? You know, I'm like, like you said, barely trying to make rent, doing what I can over here. How do I not become a nihilist and only wanna destroy things?

Sure. So the first thing, and it sounds stupid, but it's vote. I mean, seniors figured it out. They figured out if they vote, they get money.

Yeah.

So if young people want to figure out more child tax credits, you know, low-interest loans for business, whatever it might be, more opportunities to engage in this economy, they need— the first and foremost, they need to vote. Young people do have a lot of agency. There is huge opportunity. I know that you're making money in the mainstream economy. If you're willing to work hard. I mean, things are, things are worse for young people than they are for old people now. But the reality is things are less bad here than almost anywhere in the world. Every problem I'm talking about, it's, it's prevalent elsewhere and even worse. So for example, if you take the poor state Mississippi, the average household income there is still the same or higher than it is in the UK, Germany, South Korea, or Japan. So a lot of the anger and anxiety among young people is justified, but some of it is your phone reminding you that if you don't have a hot boyfriend and you're not vacationing at the Hotel du Cap like all your friends seem to be doing on a Gulfstream, that somehow you're failing. So there's all this wealth porn trying to make you feel bad about your state in life. I do think there's, if you're hardworking, understand technology, there's still a lot of opportunity. But there's just no getting around it. We're going to need new policies. I'm like, I've been pretty open about my politics. I've endorsed publicly Harris for president. Her economic plan would be— would increase the deficit by a third. Trump's economic plan would blow the deficit or be triple the deficit addition. That's just— that is essentially a tax on young people. So I'm kind of a one-policy voter at this point. I think young people need more money. And this notion that, well, it's just a giveaway. Well, we give away money all the goddamn time. Corporations are paying the lowest tax rate since 1938. The super rich, not the near rich, but the super rich, the wealthiest 25 Americans pay an average tax rate of 6 to 8%. So I think we need an alternative minimum tax. I think we need higher corporate taxes. And I like what Portugal proposed. You know, Magic Juan ran for president. Portugal just passed a tax holiday. Everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 pays no taxes. 'Cause they found that their younger generation was anxious, depressed, and also, quite frankly, leaving. I think we need something like that. I think we need sort of a Marshall Plan to level up young people because what we're seeing, what we're seeing is that 40 years ago, 60% of people aged 30 to 34 had at least one child. Now it's 27%. People are literally kind of opting out and opting out as, I don't want to bring kids into this world. And I don't think it's 'cause they don't want kids. I think it's 'cause they can't afford them. So, you know, what's the point of all of this? If people, if your kids are anxious, depressed, obese, and don't want to have children, like what is the point of all this? And is it to create a class of, You know, it's this lottery economy where let's just try and create as many billionaires as possible, even if it comes at the expense of young people or people who are just trying to be millionaires. So I think quite frankly, I just think we're all fucked up. I don't think we've got our priorities straight. Once you're above $2 or $3 million a year in income, you're not gonna get any happier. So why, I'm turning into, you know, this sounds very populist, but why wouldn't we have a very progressive tax structure at the highest levels instead of a tax code that, that massively declines once you get really wealthy. And the myth in our tax code is that the rich don't pay taxes. Actually, the workhorses pay a disproportionate share. The bottom 50% pay almost no federal income tax. And the top 2% pay about 90% of the taxes. But there's some nuance there, and that is, I call them the workhorses. Mom's a baller. A partner at Skadden Arps, M&A transactions, makes $2 million a year. Dad is a chiropractor and he has 2 clinics. He clears $600,000, $2.6 million a year, right? That is a crazy amount of money. They probably need to live in a city in a blue state to have those types of jobs, which means at that income level they're making, they're probably paying 48 to 52% in taxes. So when you say the rich need to pay more taxes and they think, well, I'm the rich, They're like, well, boss, I'm kind of working for the government at this point. I don't need to pay any more taxes. Once you make the jump to light speed and you can have the privilege I have where I basically buy and sell assets to make a living, I start companies, I sell them, I peace out to Florida because I have that kind of mobility. My average tax rate the last 10 years has been 17%. So when I was your age making a lot of money, but it was all current income, I was paying 40 to 50%. Once I started making a shit ton of money, my tax rate plummeted. So it's the plummet part I don't understand. And I don't see any reason why you're not gonna lose any happiness. If you took taxes, say alternative minimum taxes to 50% from 17 for someone like me, I'm not gonna lose any happiness. Whereas if you can give someone a child tax credit, take them from $45,000 to $55,000, that changes everything in that household. So I think our tax policy, our fiscal policy, I think it's all designed to shove wealth from young to old.

Scott talks a lot about how the game is rigged against young people, and I think he's right. But there's an angle most people miss. The average young American spends 2.5 hours a day on social media, 900 hours a year creating content, building audiences, going viral for platforms owned by billionaires who are getting rich off of their labor while the creators see almost none of that upside. We've handed an gave an entire generation a sharecropper's deal and told them it's an influencer career. So if you're a young person creating content, breaking down politics, economics, culture, like whatever you actually care about, and your audience lives on Instagram or TikTok, you don't have an audience. You have a following on somebody else's property. One algorithm change and it's gone. That's where Beehive comes in. Beehive is the all-in-one platform to publish, grow, and monetize your newsletter. And I'm obsessed with it because the founder Tyler and I believe deeply in this same thing, that you need built-in referral programs, intense analytics, and an ad network that actually brings sponsors directly to you that you can get paid subscriptions from day one. I don't think young people are lazy. They're not broke because they bought avocado toast, for fuck's sake. They're broke because every system they've been handed— housing, education, social media— extracts value from them instead of building it for them. A newsletter on Beehive is one of the few plays where you actually own what you build. Your list, your revenue, your asset. The system won't fix itself. So I think you got to go own something. Go to beehive.com, which is spelled beehive.com, and use code Cody30 for 30% off your first 3 months. Stop building on borrowed land. It's interesting. You know, I think the other part that I find fascinating is the institutional incentives that say big finance companies have. So, you know, for instance, today, if you have BlackRock, Blackstone, some of the really large companies out there buying a bunch of single-family homes, well, they have so much of— they have so much money, so much of our money really from us investing in funds and ETFs, etc., that not only can they pay more, but they also have the institutional benefit of having great credit with all the money we have on hand and thus like a half to one-third of the interest rate. So I think some of the reason why things have become so expensive are not just I don't agree with you on all the tax policies perfectly, but I do think it seems wrong that somebody could use my dollars to have a lower interest rate to pay more for our houses and then bundle them again. We also saw during 2008 that mass bundling of the American dream of homeownership can be problematic as well. So that is another one that I worry about. What do you think though about the people who might say, "Hey, I actually want to pay my fair share in taxes because like you said, where else is there better to pay taxes in America, but they're concerned about things like trains that go to nowhere in California and government that can't do much with our tax dollars.

I don't think— look, do we need to cut— do we need to increase tax rates or cut spending? The answer is yes. If America was a household, yeah, America's making $50,000, that household's making $50,000 and it's spending $70,000 and it has $330,000 in debt. That's just not sustainable. And every day we get new credit card offers to keep rolling and paying continuing to spend $70,000, not $50,000, that we get $7 trillion, $7 trillion in spending, $5 trillion in tax receipts. You just can't manage a household responsibly. At some point, the Chinese or whoever aren't going to show up for one of our Treasury auctions and interest rates are going to skyrocket. And you're going to have, you know, shit's going to get real pretty fast. So I, I just don't think there's any getting around it. I like states like Florida and Texas that have No state— I like when states compete. And I think ultimately competition is probably gonna bring down sort of this out-of-control spending in some of the blue states because they're just— people are leaving. I think it's good to have interstate competition. Government, when an economy goes above sort of 30, 32% of spending is the government, it just becomes very inefficient. Two-thirds of employment in Argentina is government employees. That's just not— There's no productivity, there's no incentive there. So I would love it if someone had an adult conversation and came in and said, we've gotta cut Social Security spending by 10 or 20%. We're gonna have to cut, you know, 40% of all spending right now, government spending goes to seniors. It's about to be 50%, which lowers the amount of money we can invest in technology, R&D, and education, which have a much bigger payoff. I think we're gonna have to massively cut social services, entitlements. It all leads to entitlements. You know, we're going to have to look at everything and we're going to have to raise taxes because the far left and the far right, as far as I can tell, come together and agree on two topics. They agree on reckless spending, right? I want more services, more social spending. You want more military and lower taxes. I know. Let's do it all. And we'll just keep racking up the deficit because young people haven't done the math and we still can continue to borrow. Our credit card hasn't been shut off. It's irresponsible. It's mortgaging. Our future. So I'm with you. No one wants to have that conversation. The third biggest issue among people your age in the election is the deficit. And it never gets mentioned among our politicians. It's just, I mean, the right, there's a myth that Republicans are more fiscally responsible. They love deficits as much as we do, as much as Democrats do. So I'm with you. I would love to see All right, we have $2 trillion in deficit. You can have a small deficit, $200-400 billion, as long as you're growing the economy. So that's $1.6 trillion. All right, come up with $800 billion in tax cuts and/or in spending cuts, and the other side will agree to $800 billion in increased taxes.

But that sounds way too reasonable.

There needs to be a grownup in the room at some point here. It's gone on way too long. And because, The deficit really hasn't popped up. I mean, we're now this year gonna spend more money on interest on the debt than we spend on our military. I saw that. That's at some point it's gonna become, begin crowding out almost everything. So yeah, I'd like to think we're ready for an adult conversation. It hasn't happened yet.

Fingers crossed. So if, if you know, if we're sitting out there right now and you're talking to a young person and they're about to slit their wrists, they see no light at the end of the tunnel. What, what do you tell a young person today? Like what is the actionable thing that you can go do now Scott, having seen so many different moves in markets, what are some words of wisdom you'd have if they want to make money?

Okay. I just— well, I just start— I just wrote a book on creating economic security, and I do think there's a formula. The first is focus, and that is find something, find something you're good at. People say to follow your passion. I think that's bullshit. Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich, and the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting., right? Be a DJ on weekends, play in a soccer league, you know, design jewelry with your friends, open a restaurant when you're already rich. The vanity industries are really difficult because there's 180,000 people in SAG-AFTRA. These are incredibly— it's not easy to get a union card. That's the union representing actors and stage workers or producers. 83% of them last year didn't qualify for health insurance because they didn't make $23,000. So acting might be your passion, but unless you're in the top 1% and you're getting bright blinking green signals that you're in the top 1%, go find something else. And I don't want to crush your dreams. Just have a sober conversation around what's required to make a living in that industry. So find something you're good at. And the key part of that is find something you're good at in a non-romantic industry. The guy who has this studio, I've been here twice this week. This isn't that romantic. He found some shitty loft space on Avenue B. And rents it out to podcasters and is probably making really good money. That is not— he didn't dream of that when he was 9. I know I'm going to install sound insulation on a loft in a mediocre area in Manhattan and rent it out to podcasters. I don't think he was dreaming that when he was 9. But this is a good business.

Now I just opened 2 more.

There you go. This is a find something you're good at and think, I could become great. And by the way, if you don't know what 20 When I was 17, I thought I was gonna be a quarterback. When I was 19, I thought I was gonna be a pediatrician. When I was 22, I thought I was gonna be an investment banker. I got a job in investment bank. I ended up in business intelligence and analytics. I didn't even know what that meant until I was 25 or 26. So try and find some— your job in your 20s is to workshop and find something you're good at and maybe could be in the top 10 or the top 1%. And forgive yourself if it doesn't involve College, because 2/3 of kids don't end up in college and there's this industrial shaming complex. I've been at these parties. Did you hear, you know, Max dropped out of Rutgers? And it's like, oh, shame, shame. You know, the parents have fucked up. The kid is a failure. 2/3 of our kids do not end up with a college degree. Workshop stuff, find something you could be good at, maybe great. It might be being a tax accountant. Okay, do you understand? Are you willing to go to college? Are you willing to get a CPA? Do you understand numbers? Do you understand the tax code? Are you good with clients? Because if you can become in the top 10% or the top 1% of tax lawyers, those people get to fly private and have a broader selection set of mates than they deserve, which makes them really passionate about the tax law. I am so passionate about analytics because it gave me the ability to take care of my kids, take care of my dad, have crazy, outrageous vacations, and remove stress from my key relationships. Passion comes from artistry, mastery, and economic security. So whatever that thing is that gives you the ability to make some good money that you're good at, maybe even great at in an industry that's not sexy, you're gonna be compassionate about it. I'm building a home right now in London and there's the soapstone guy or the marble guy, and he's this Iraqi immigrant and everybody knows him. He can tell you everything about the veining and the marble. And I was very open with him and he's been open with me. He makes £2.1 million top line. He has a marble company. He clears about $800,000.

That's pretty good margins.

Yeah. He's a guy in his 40s. He's been in marble since he was 28, and he's passionate about marble and soapstone because it affords him a really nice life and he's great at it and he gets a lot of camaraderie. He gets a lot of prestige, relevance. You know, pride, ability to take care, you know, to be economically secure. So the first thing is focus. Second thing is, I call it stoicism, but the one thing that's in your control is spending. You gotta develop a savings muscle when you're young and see if you can get alignment with your roommates or your romantic partner and gamify saving money. Even you gotta figure out, you gotta have a savings muscle that you can flex. When I was a junior in UCLA, I wasn't going back for my senior year unless I saved $3,000 through the summer. I had 11 weeks to save $3,000, earn and save. So everyone in the fraternity knew who the 4 kids were who didn't have money. I went to UCLA, I was in a fraternity with mostly Jewish kids in the Valley. They all had money. There were 4 of us that everybody knew were broke. Like our parents weren't helping us. We moved in together in a room in the, in the house and we had a whiteboard and we gamified spending. I spent $78 a week including rent and food for 12 weeks. I ate Top Ramen, bananas, and milk. And my big treat is every Sunday night I'd go to Sizzler. You ask your parents. And for $4.99, I was on the crew team. The entire crew team would go and we would go there at 3:00 PM when it opened and we'd stay till 8:00 PM and we would just eat several million calories. And it was fun. I mean, would I rather have more money? Yeah. But the ability to gamify, and especially with a partner, save money and start investing, If you're young, you gotta figure out that savings muscle. And it's getting reward from other things, getting reward from fitness, from friends. The nice thing about being young is you don't need as much money to have fun. There's this Instagram generation that thinks you gotta have a Birkin bag or go to Coachella to have fun. When you're in your 20s, pretty much like beer and making out is a pretty good BRAP. There's a lot of cheap shit out there available for 20-somethings.

Plus you can't really do it after you're married.

Yeah, then it gets much harder. Well, actually it doesn't get harder.

It stays in Austin, Pauley though, pretty big.

It doesn't get harder, it gets much more expensive. So. It's true. Anyways, I call it stoicism, but getting a savings muscle. The third is time. For the majority of our time on this planet, we haven't lived past 35. So young people just cannot imagine they're gonna live to be 100. And most of them are. And they also can't calibrate how fast time is gonna go. Wow, my life has gone really slowly, said no one ever. If you from the age of 22 just figure out a way to get 2, 3, 5% of your income outta your hands, don't even— 99% of us will spend everything that comes into our hands. You have the brightest people in the world with a godlike technology hitting you at the exact right moment, a chance to upgrade from economy to economy comfort, to add flourless chocolate cake with your panini, whatever it is, right? Telling you, you deserve this, it's worth it. Oh, there's 2 people looking at this hotel room. You better— there's only 1 left. Buy now. Find a forced savings mechanism, 2% to 5% in your 20s. When you're my age, you're gonna be fine. You don't start until your 30s, that's fine, but it's gonna need to be 5% to 10%. It's gonna be closer to 15% to 20% when you're in your 40s. But you're gonna live longer than you think. Time is gonna go fast. Well, I'm only gonna get, you know, 9% in the markets. Well, okay, that means in 24 years it's gonna be up 8-fold. So the power of compound interest and time. And then the final thing where I really screwed up was the power of diversification. And that is, I've always made a lot of money, right? I came out of the gates hot starting e-commerce companies, and I was raised in the, or came of professional age where you were told, be in it to win it, go deeper, go deeper. And my company was about to go public, and I was that guy that borrowed money against his stocks to buy more stock. So when 2000 hit, I went from being, from looking at jets, no joke, to broke. Clawed my way back, 2008, all my money was in tech again. Boom, broke again. And that was about the time my first son came along, which was really upsetting. But diversification is your Kevlar. And that is, 2 weeks ago I found out I made one of my biggest, I invested $5 million in a tech space healthcare company. Tier 1 VCs, baller CEO, best investors, had to elbow my way to get in. That's a big investment for me. It went out of business last week. That's a zero for me. But I don't invest more than 3 or 4% of my net worth in any one thing. So it ruined my hour, but it didn't even ruin my day, and it certainly didn't ruin my week. Diversification is your Kevlar. The moment you have anything resembling an asset base, you want to try and take pieces of it and put it in stuff that is uncorrelated as possible. I'm about to invest in an aircraft maintenance company in El Salvador. I just want anything that's away from my tech world. I love, I now appreciate diversification because once you have an asset base, the way you get rich is probably through a little bit of concentration, your own business. You double down on a house, you fix it up, you flip it, whatever it might be. But the way you stay somewhat rich is through diversification. And I didn't realize that. I was always reading these stories about, Steve Ballmer borrowing stock, Fred Smith doubling down on FedEx, Mark Zuckerberg never selling a share. No, diversify. 'Cause here's the thing, the market will always trump individual performance. And no matter how good you are, if you're in tech in 2000, you're gonna get hurt. Amazon lost 90% of its value from '99 to 2001. And then also a little bit of, Forgiveness. Recognize that when your stocks go down, recognize when you have a business fail, that most of it is not your fault. And at the same time, when you kill it and you buy stock and it doubles and you were smart enough or lucky, you weren't smart enough to buy Nvidia 3 years ago, you were lucky enough. You are never more prone to a big mistake than after a big win. Bring in your horns. So I wish I'd learned diversification I didn't save money in my 20s and 30s. My first feeling when my son came marching out of my girlfriend, it was supposed to be bright lights and angels singing. I felt so nauseous and I thought, well, okay, in addition to childbirth being gross, which I think it is, I felt incredible shame 'cause I was sitting there at 40 years old, I'd made so much fucking money and I was broke because I wasn't smart enough to diversify. 'Cause I thought, oh, I'm such a baller that my company's gonna be worth $1 billion, so I'm gonna keep doubling down. So my first sentiment when I saw my son was, I failed this kid. And I want to help young people realize, I don't want anyone to ever feel that way. And you don't need to be a billionaire. Just start saving some money. Real estate's a great force savings. Figure out a way to get it outta your hands. Keep saving. And just in case you don't go double platinum or have a podcast that's number one or have a movie or buy Nvidia, You don't need it. I can get you rich. That's the good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly. So what I would tell young people is even if you don't end up in an amazing job, if you start early and you follow this pattern, you're gonna be economically fine.

That's such a good point. You know, I think there's a lot of porn these days about, you know, sleeping on floors, sleeping on couches, and that that's the only way to make it too. And that if you wanna be successful, you have to go all in on your business. And I don't know about you, but I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to sleep on the floor if I didn't have to. Yeah. I didn't want to have to sacrifice everything early on. I wanted to work really, really, really hard. But I think in finance we get lucky 'cause we learn that, you know, from an early age. And for most young people today, if they watch anybody who's had success, they go, well, they went all in. And it goes back to your point. I don't think I'm a top 1%er. Like, I think we should all have a little bit more humility. Assume you're gonna fail more and then you won't. And then I always giggle, like when people say they wanna be a DJ, you go, you know how to become a DJ? Become the CEO of Goldman Sachs. It's more likely. DJ Soul. Yeah. And, and you buy your way onto the stage. You know who else buys their way onto the stage? Paris Hilton. Shaq. Oh, good person. How does Shaq make his money? Fucking chicken stores now. Yeah. And car washes, which I love as well. So I think you're right.

Well, I, I went to the US Open and I thought, okay, I'd rather be Nadal or Federer than number 3 or number 4 ranked tennis player. I'd rather be, 'Cause I get to go to the US Open and sit in great seats and I'm not stressed and throwing up in the— You know, I'd rather be the number 1 or number 2 player in the world. I just was— I coach a lot of young men and I had this kid, he got into MIT and he got— But he had a chance to play basketball. He's played basketball his whole life at what I call a pretty mediocre school. Like, boss, go to MIT and buy a fucking basketball team in 20 years. Like, what are you thinking? Sports is a terrible business. It's, you know, if you do the math on what's required to become a basketball player, it is much easier to win the lottery. It's just crazy. So you need to have— what I tell young people is you can have it all, you just can't have it all at once. And you need to have a sober conversation around the trade-offs. And a lot of times what people don't take into account is, you know, you can control your spending. And there's nothing wrong with cutting your spending and saying, I'm not gonna live to work, I'm gonna work to live. Well, fine, but you're gonna need to lower your cost of living. And there's nothing wrong with moving to St. Louis and dual incomes make 80 or 100 grand. You can get a home for that, have a really nice life. But be clear, if you expect to live in New York and you expect to have— I survey my kids. When I say my kids, I mean my students. 70 to 80% of them expect to be in the top 1% of income earners by the time they're 35.

Do they realize it's the top 1%?

Well, no, because I think the top 1% income now is like $700 grand. Yep. They don't think of that as that much money. Mm-hmm. I mean, the average compensation at NYU Stern is $212,000 first year. So they think, okay, within 7, 8 years I should be making $600,000 or $700,000. And a lot of them will. But if you expect to be in the top 1% and maintain a lifestyle in New York or LA or one of the super cities, you're gonna have to work pretty hard. You're gonna have to, you know, I had some fun growing up, but I don't, I always say that from the age of kind of 25 to 45, I didn't really do anything but work. And it comes at a real price. I lost, I would say I lost my hair, I lost my marriage, and it was worth it.

Yeah, it's interesting. I do think you either get to choose short-term or long-term pain. That's right. And I wish somebody had told me that earlier. Which is these days, I never liked to, when, you know, when they play those videos, like the reaction videos of the, girl crying because life's hard and they make fun of her. And that never really sits that well with me because I think it's because we kind of failed them. We didn't tell them it's going to be fucking awful. Your first job is not supposed to kill you from how hard it is. It's supposed to kill you from the pure monotony of like awful labor. Is your first job finance? My first. Yeah. And so, yeah, 80-hour weeks, taking all the, you know, Series 7, 24, 63, all that jazz. And I was the dumbest and the, you know, the least qualified and didn't have any fancy, you know, friends or family. And so, but it was also awesome because I learned massive pain tolerance. Really?

Yeah. It's a great training.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's probably what we should tell them instead, that your first job's gonna suck, but eventually it'll be worth it.

Well, what I would say is that, you know, almost it's like rearing children. It gets better. Yeah. We, we're told a lie that it's gonna be great. At least for me, I don't, I think babies are awful. I couldn't stand the first 2 years. I thought it was just torture. I thought my job was just to make sure this thing didn't get near a body of water and keep it alive. And I didn't find that that rewarding.

Do things make you happy though? You seem to have like a steady state of unhappiness.

Oh, steady state of unhappiness. Here's the good news. I hate my life less and less every day. That's good. But what I say about kids is 2 to 5, it gets kind of fun. And then 5 to 15 is amazing. And then you kind of lose them again. I'm going through that right now.

But—

What's your oldest?

17. Okay, so you haven't seen the other side yet. Yeah, no, I— Maybe that's good.

I'm waiting for that. We'll see. Okay. We'll see. It's hard to believe it when they like, don't, you know, they don't— you call them and they don't. It's like, it's like that Tina Fey thing where you have a crush on somebody. My son was in town doing his college tour and I'm like, would you like to grab coffee? I mean, you're probably busy, but, and I'm busy, but if you're free, I could find time, but you probably don't want to. I mean, it's just, it's just my, you'll never find people less impressed with you than your teenage teenagers. But anyways, look, everything's a trade-off. You just have to decide what you want to trade off and when and how much. And I get it. I'm not gonna tell kids to give up their 20s. Have some fun, spend some money, try and find a little bit of money to put away. And also just recognize your first job, even if you don't like it, you know, give it a couple years, give it 2 or 3 years to see if it gets better. But also recognize you may not end up in your dream job right outta college. Few of us do. But that's a learning. I went into investment banking. I worked at Morgan Stanley. I hated it. They hated me. I was terrible at it. And that was a learning, but it was really good training 'cause it gave me attention to detail. It gave me kind of the ability to suffer a little bit. It taught me a little bit about working in a large organization. It also told me I don't have the skills to be in a big company. I'm too insecure. Anytime people went into a conference room, I would think they were talking about me. I didn't have patience or maturity. If I met someone senior to me that I think was smarter than me, as smart as me, I'd get angry that they were making more. I mean, I just was too immature to handle a big company. And people romanticize entrepreneurship. I went into entrepreneurship out of defense mechanism. I'm like, I'm just not gonna be successful. I met my stallmate from Morgan Stanley who's been in investment banking for 30 years now. We were both very transparent about our wealth. We ended up in almost the same spot economically. He's endured much less stress than me. If you have access to corporate America, the US corporation is the greatest wealth creator in history. The reality is most of us don't have the skills. We don't have the patience. It's not easy to get up and put on a tie. It's not easy to go to corporate events and pretend to like the boss's husband. This shit is not easy. It's awful. And be thoughtful and be patient. And occasionally you're going to suffer injustice. Less intelligent and less hardworking are gonna get promoted. There's injustice everywhere. But if you can endure those injustices, typically over time, the American corporation is a great way to get wealthy slowly. And the majority of entrepreneurs, I think, do it out of, I mean, the majority of entrepreneurs are immigrants. They can't go to work for Google. They didn't get to go to work for Dartmouth. So when kids come to my office hours, they think, they say, oh, I have an offer from JP Morgan, but I think of starting my own business. They think I'm gonna break into song and say, go for the small business. Fuck that. JPMorgan, here you come.

Well, it's true. I mean, I was at Goldman like I was a shitty little peon analyst back in the day for 2 years and I hated my life for all 2 years of it. And to this day, you know, whatever, 12, 13 years later, it's still like Cody Sanchez. Yeah, she's on these businesses. She's got this online thing. She also worked at Goldman Sachs.

I'm like, that's huge credibility.

Huge credibility. And I hear they spend like about $100,000 a year training new, new members. So that's probably the cheapest university you can get is a great training, is a corporate MBA, basically.

Great, incredibly smart peers. Yeah. It's the way I describe it. It's like, it's like having served in the Marines. You're really glad you did it. Past tense. Yep. But I, I'm, see, I've started a bunch of business, but what did I roll out first? That I was at Morgan Stanley. Yeah. Because we, we all are proud of our brands and the institutions, but anyone who right outta college can go get a graduate degree called a US corporation. I would say do it. You might be good at it. And if not, it's gonna help you zero in on what you're good at. And they do these crazy things called health insurance and retirement plans and training. First thing they did was they sent me to Columbia for this mini MBA.

Yeah, I got my MBA at Georgetown through State Street.

There you go.

So same thing. I mean, it would've cost me $160,000 is what the executive program at Georgetown cost. That's crazy. It's crazy. And I mean, I had a hell of a time, but, I think the most valuable thing I've ever done was work in corporations and start a business, not my MBA.

I think that's, yeah, like everyone has a path. I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. Ooh. You're good at what you do, you're smart, you wanna make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you wanna do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but if you were really good and knew what you wanted to do, you don't need a graduate degree. You just go do it unless it's, you wanna be a lawyer or a doctor.

That's a great point.

Business school's for those of us who were trying to figure it out. Career switchers, like all the investment bankers wanted to be consultants 'cause we didn't wanna give up the money. We just knew we hated investment banking. All the consultants wanted to be investment bankers. You would've think we'd get together and be like, hey, it sucks over here. But it is a great way to figure out sort of what you'll like more and also get, get a great credential. It, for the, for the first time, business school is not a no-brainer. When I applied, it was a no-brainer. Tuition was $2,000 a year. Wow. Yeah. My total tuition, UCLA and Berkeley as an in-state student was $7,000 for 7 years, total tuition and 76% admissions rate at UCLA. I graduated with a 2.27 GPA, true story. And Berkeley let me into graduate school. Things have changed dramatically and I'm now a good citizen. I pay a lot of taxes. I give a lot of money back to those alma maters. So I would argue they're really slack admission standards. Was the right way to go.

Fascinating. What do you think about, you know, one of the other things that seems to me leads to success long term, if people actually want to, quote unquote, win monetarily, is like a massive ability to handle failure. You, you, I think, are really interesting because you're very, you know, you're not quiet about your opinions. If they don't turn out to be right, you go, well, here's my thought process. That seemed reasonable and it worked or it didn't. But I'm going to at least say the quiet part out loud and we can see how I tracked one way or the other. How did you get comfortable being wrong publicly and getting over it.

Am I wrong a lot?

I don't think you're wrong a lot, by the way.

No, I'm wrong often. I get a lot of strength from my atheism.

That's fascinating. Why? You just don't think anything matters?

To a certain extent. And that is, I'm convinced that at some point I'm gonna look into my kids' eyes and know our relationship's coming to an end. And it's going so fast. And everyone who I'm worried about their opinion or being shamed by, they're gonna be dead really soon, and so am I. So I think a recognition of the finite nature of life and your insignificance gives you a little bit more courage to try and squeeze as much juice out of this lemon as physically possible. And I do try to live out loud. And when I screw up, I try to forgive myself because when someone else publicly fails, when they say something stupid or they have a business fail, most people will never be entrepreneurs 'cause they don't wanna risk public failure. It's humiliating. Most guys here, most guys, especially nowadays, don't approach a woman they're attracted to because they're worried about rejection. And what you realize, or what I realize, and it's been my superpower, is my ability to move through fail. My superpower is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president in high school. I lost all three elections. And based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president, where I went on to— wait for it— lose. I've started 9 companies. 4 have failed, 3 are kind of a tie, got the money back, and 2 were hits. All you need is 1. Yeah. 1 out of 7 businesses succeeds. So I started 9. And my superpower was when I had a business fail or when I was divorced or when I lost my mom, I knew how to mourn and I knew how to move on. And the only thing I can guarantee anyone is you're gonna have a certain amount of tragedy and a certain amount of joy in your life. The ratio of those things, some of it's outta your control, where and when you're born, a lot of luck, health of your loved ones. But the thing that's in your control is your ability to move through that failure. And I've been beamed, I've been shot in the face professionally and personally. And I was always able to say, okay, my business failed. Learned a lot. I'm going to go raise more money and start a new business.

What does that look like? Like right after you lose an election or you fail in a business, what do you do? Do you sit with like a whiskey?

No, I, you know, it's, I think it's different for everybody. What I would suggest is everyone needs to find things that make them feel good about themselves.

Friends. What do you do?

Well, I have, so this isn't going to come as a surprise to you. I struggle with anger and depression. I'm very cognizant of it and I have a series of kind of activities to try and when I feel like I'm going dark, what's weird is failure or adversity doesn't send me into a depression. Other things do. So I think it's probably more chemical with me. But everyone needs to figure out how do I maintain a sense of enthusiasm? I have so many really successful friends, came out of Ivy League schools, started hedge funds, got to a billion under management, were making 2, 3, $10 million a year, and then the market goes south on 'em. There's a bunch of redemptions, their fund closes down, and for the next 5 to 10 years, they're like stuck. They can't get past the failure. And it's not hitting a home run, it's your ability to just get to the plate as many times. 'Cause at some point you're gonna connect. So my cognitive behavior or tricks for trying to bust out of a a depression, when I feel myself going dark, I have an acronym, SCAFA. The first thing I do is I sweat. Exercising resets everything for me. It's like pressing the reset buttons. Yeah, you're fit. Well, I'm trying. I'm holding onto every last vestige of my youth. C, clean. I try and eat at home. Not a lot of butter or salt, which I find is really helpful. Abstinence in the sense that I love alcohol and I love THC. I'm a better version of me a little bit fucked up. I love being high. I love marijuana, I love alcohol. I'm really good at both of those things. And I think like, I'm like most people, they're an enhancement to my life and I know how to control them mostly. But when I'm feeling depressed, I just take them outta my life. Whatever's happening to those sensors in my brain, I just don't wanna fuck with them. F is for family. My kids are so awful that they force me to take myself outta my own head and stop focusing on my own shit. They're there just— if I can be around my boys, I know that they will come up with reasons why I need to focus on them. That's actually quite healthy. And the A is affection. I will tell my kids jokingly I'm not feeling good, and they know that means we watch TV. They'll throw their legs on mine. I let my dogs on the couch. Physical mammal touch, I think it's very restorative to me. So whenever I feel myself going dark, and the way I feel myself going dark is I start just getting pissed off at everyone and everything, and I start feeling really down on myself. I get quiet, I withdraw, and have trouble sleeping. And I'm like, but I've gotten to a point where I recognize it and I can snap out of it. But your ability to move through failure, your ability to endure it, you wanna punch above your weight class professionally or romantically, get used to rejection. Most people aren't willing to endure rejection.

You stop caring about it after a while, I think. You kind of like inculcate yourself against it.

I've had disasters professionally. I've had a company go Chapter 11. I've had stocks 18 months after I invested go to zero, and I can get through it. I don't mind it. I've been single. I can't tell you the amount of rejection I've endured from women. And that's the reason I'm with somebody who's much higher character and much hotter than me is all the women who reject. I was fine. I could get past it. I could get past it. I wasn't scared of approaching people to ask for money, to ask them to come to work for me, to ask them to be my clients, to ask them to go on a date with me. That is the key to my success, is an abundance of rejection.

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With a 3-second start, easy open lever, and dedicated brew-over-ice button, it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way. Sip for yourself. Shop VertuoUp exclusively at Nespresso.com. This is a slightly inappropriate question, but have you ever tried psychedelics? And that doesn't make you less of an atheist ever? Like, have you done, like, where you do the whole thing and you put on the eye mask and you lay down and you see the spirit world? I did it in Austin, actually.

The tracks. Yeah, I did. I just did a massive hit of ketamine. That's the only time I've ever really done psychedelics other than mushroom chocolate. I loved it. It was a ton of fun. I learned a lot.

About yourself?

Just intentional about— I went in very intentional. What is my purpose? What is my purpose? But no, I'm pretty convinced that that whole death thing's gonna be just a wonderful long sleep. I don't, and by the way, I wanna acknowledge that as an atheist, our belief that kind of the world was nothing and then it exploded, that's pretty ridiculous too. I don't wanna in any way try and poo-poo religion or faith. I think it's a tremendous source of comfort for people. I've always enjoyed going to church and temple. I like the community. But no, I don't have an invisible friend. And I think at some point this is— I don't think this is a dress rehearsal. I think this is my first and last act.

There's something beautiful about that, though. I always loved that Emma Bombek quote where she says, "When I stand before God at the end of my days, I hope I can say to him that I have not one drop left. I used everything he gave me." And I think she was an atheist. So it's funny that she used God in the quote, but I think that's kind of what she meant. She's like, I'm just leaving it on the line. Like, whatever's left.

Yeah, leave it on the field. Who was the great— was it a Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, the one with the unibrow?

Oh, Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo. She had this great quote, said, I want my exit to be glorious and I don't want to come back.

Oh, that's on brand for you.

There you go.

I like that one.

So, you know, Frida. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Okay. I could see that on one of your next thumbnails for one of your podcasts. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about— I want to talk slightly about young men today, because I think increasingly you're talking to them in particular in a way that's not so hard, bro, you got to do X, Y, and Z. It's like sophisticated, which I think speaks to a lot a lot of this generation. Yeah, what's the deal with young men doing more video games and opting out and not asking women, you know, to go out on dates? What are we doing, and how do you get around that as a young man?

Well, first, let's look at the numbers. There's no group globally that's ascended faster than women. There are more women globally seeking tertiary education than men. And when you look at— there's probably 40 or 50 nations that don't allow women to seek tertiary education. Actually, I don't know if that's true.

Does tertiary mean university?

Yeah, higher education, college and graduate education. More women are in graduate school now, higher education globally, than men. Yeah, that's a wonderful thing. In the last 30 years, the number of women elected to some form of parliament or electoral body has doubled. Women are killing it. And by the way, I don't think there's anything we should do to get in the way of that. Single women own more homes than single men. Women under the age of 30 in urban centers are making more money than men. In the next 5 years, there's going to be 3 female college grads for every 2 male college grads. 2 out of 3 women under the age of 30 has a boyfriend. 1 out of 3 men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. Why? Because women are dating older. Why are they dating older? We are producing way too few economically and emotionally viable men. And there's a variety of reasons. There's straight biology. Men's prefrontal cortex is about 18 months behind. When you applied to college, When there was another senior from your high school who was a male, you were basically applying, you were competing against a junior. They were less mature. Boys mature later. They catch up at about 25, but at 18, they're basically a 16-and-a-half-year-old girl. School education is highly biased against boys. If you think about the behavior we want in school, it's sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You're describing a girl. Schools that are just boys only end up with twice the amount of recess time. Because boys are like, boys are like dogs. They need to be tired. They need to be kind of worn out. In addition, there's some societal factors that have been especially rough on boys. We have the second most single-parent homes in the world. And if you reverse engineer where a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model. And what's interesting in the studies is that girls in single-parent homes have the same outcomes, same college attendance, same rates of depression. All the studies show that while physically stronger, boys are emotionally and mentally much weaker. So they're not going to college, they're not mating, they're not dating. Half of millennial men say they are no longer dating. They're no longer even trying.

This is like the incel movement.

They're much more prone. Online dating, it used to be family, friends, and school how you met people. Now it's 70% online. And we don't like to talk about this because we like to sort of assume that every problem men facing is kind of their own fault and that any problem facing women, it's because they're victimized. And if you look at online dating, basically most women want the same guy. And that is, if you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women, 46 of the women will show all of their attention to just 4 men. They all want the same dude. And so that leaves, that leaves 46 men vying for the attention of 4 women. So a man of average attractiveness on Tinder has to swipe right 200 times to get one match. So that's one coffee. And then 4 of the 5 coffees will ghost him because their filter kicks in again. So a man of average attractiveness has to swipe right 1,000 times to get one coffee. So he gets what he feels is validation of his lack of worth in the mating market. They're much more prone to addiction. They're much more prone to conspiracy theory. They're much less likely to leave home. So what you have is an entire generation of men without male role models who are more prone to addiction and who start engaging, they become much more prone to misogynistic content. They start blaming women. They become more nationalistic. They start blaming immigrants. They stop believing in climate change. And some, they become really shitty citizens. And the ripple effect it's having is the mating market. And that is 3/4 of women say economic viability is key in a mate. It's only 1 in 4 men. We don't care. Men are disproportionately evaluated on their economic wellbeing. Women disproportionately evaluated on their aesthetics. But when the pool, men mate horizontally and down socioeconomically, women horizontally and up. But when the pool of horizontal and up of men is shrinking every year, there's just less household formation and there's more loneliness. And if you talk to couples that have been married longer than 30 years, 3/4 will say one was much more interested in the other in the beginning. And it was always the man was much more interested. Because the downside of sex is so much greater for women than men, men are much less choosy. Men feel like their obligation is to spread their seed to the four corners of the earth. Women's obligation is to be as filtered as possible, as selective as possible about inbound opportunities and pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed. So what you have is men, essentially women are much choosier than men. And when they're not going to church, not going to softball league, not going into work. Men have very few venues to demonstrate excellence. What you find with these couples is the woman says, I wasn't interested in him, but then I found out he's really kind. Totally. I liked his hands. I liked the way he smelled. I saw him present to a client. I started getting attracted to him. He made me laugh. How do you demonstrate excellence as a man when there's no venues where you're around other people for extended periods of time doing something different? You know, I was just in Israel at the Nova Music Festival Memorial, and I met this battalion of IDF soldiers, 90 men, 90 women, all outside, all fit, all meeting each other. They're finding mentors, they're finding business partners, co-founders, they're finding mates. Where does a young man demonstrate excellence if everyone's meeting online and everyone wants the same dude? It creates a few things. It creates a cadre of men who feel like they've been rejected by women, and it creates this environment And if you're in the top 10% of men, it's never been better. But it creates this Porsche polygamy environment where the guys who are the kind of the most attractive males, quite frankly, they have so much opportunity, it doesn't encourage long-term good behavior. So you end up with a cohort of men who feel totally rejected, and you have women who have found dating just across the spectrum is just a little shittier, that the guy they want is not interested in a long-term relationship. And everyone else, really, they don't have venues to kind of, if you will, fall in love. And the result is loneliness. And so I worry about young men not engaging with work, not engaging. 1 in 3 jobs used to require a college degree. Now it's 2 in 3. And in some universities in the Northeast, it's 2 to 1, women to men. So they aren't getting the qualifications. They're much more prone to addiction. And the deepest, resource companies in the world are all trying to convince young men that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online. You don't need friends. You can go to Reddit and Discord. You don't need to work. Just trade crypto or stocks on Coinbase or Robinhood. You don't need to shower, get in shape, have a plan, endure rejection, get out of the house, make— figure out how to make a woman laugh, be, you know, be persistent, endure rejection. You got YouPorn. So you have, and I feel as if almost we're developing a subspecies of mostly males that are totally asocial, asexual. And once they get kind of into their mid, late 20s, they're still living at home and they haven't developed those skills around socialization. I don't wanna say they don't become savable, but they become very hard to pull out again. And the people I hear from most on this, when I started talking about this 3 years ago, I was accused of being misogynist because is there's a gag reflex from a lot of feminists who are like, oh shit, it's Andrew Tate again, not recognizing that having empathy for men doesn't mean you're anti-women. There needs to be a more productive conversation.

Civil rights—

absolutely. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Heteronormative marriage— or gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage, nor acknowledging the issues facing men doesn't hurt women. Young men are 4 times as likely to kill themselves. They're 3 times as likely to be addicted. They're 3 times as likely to be homeless. They're 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. If there was any special interest group that was killing themselves at 4 times the rate of the control group, we'd move in with programs. Going to NYU down the block, you're gonna see, you know, Black Women's Support Group, Women in Consulting, Golden Seeds Venture Capital for Women. They're really on a lot of support groups for young men because of the privilege I recognized, because of the fact that men have had a 2,000-year head start. We're kind of holding 19-year-olds accountable. 19-year-old males. And what we're finding is there's real knock-on effects in our society. And generally speaking, when I hear from these mothers, they say the following: I got 3 kids, 2 daughters, 1 son. 1 daughter's in Chicago in PR, 1 daughter's at Penn, and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. So less mature brains, less opportunity educationally. A lot of the jobs that were on-ramps into a good middle-class life have been outsourced or offshored. A mating market that is crowding into the most attractive males and leaving everyone else out. Fewer third spaces for people to meet and fall in love and mate and have children. And it's leading in a technology sector that is trying to convince men you don't need to get out of the house, you can stay at home. And I relate to these men. I was one of them. I didn't have a lot of prospects when I was younger, living with my mother. And I could have easily just gone down a very bad path. So I think this is something that is a real societal issue. I think the biggest threats to our society aren't climate change or even income inequality. I think it's one, extremism from the far left and the far right, and two, I think it's loneliness.

I think you're right. Well, I mean, you see when you go to war-torn countries, and I spent a lot of time building businesses in Latin America, you know what? You know what civil unrest looks like. It looks like a lot of fighting age men on the side of the streets without anything else to do. If you've been through— I mean, Karim sitting over here and he's from Egypt and has seen all around the Middle East and I've traveled the Middle East and Latin America and you can feel what it feels like to be in an area where there is a different kind of powder keg, which is young men that understandably so have more aggression, more testosterone and feel like there's no outlet. And so, yeah, 100%. And you know what's interesting though, a small little spark of light, I think, you know, we are, we're in Austin, like I was telling you, and we've been trying to find a church. And so I'm Christian and grew up Catholic and I wanted to find a place. We're going to have kids. I think it like makes sense. It's a good way to install ethics and morals, in my opinion. And so it's like, where else do you go where you can sort of teach these. Yeah, exactly. And so whether that's Stoicism or Catholicism, whatever it is. And I had the damnedest thing happen. We did a little tour, a group of churches to kind of see one we would like, because I think I would have PTSD from a Catholic church again. I just— it's like too many wooden pews. But we went to this church called Red Rocks, like a New Age Christian church, which I kind of thought would freak me out, you know, text to donate. Like, I don't know, it just kind of scared me. And yet when I walked in, I was shocked. All around were these really attractive young men and women, and they were like happy, and they were meeting one another. And I went from church to church to church to church all around Austin, which is a pretty liberal place. And in each of these areas— I mean, we're talking 18-year-old kids to maybe 35-year-olds they're meeting one another. And I thought, man, if you are sort of a lost young man or woman and you are white and maybe you come from a decent background, there's probably one place where you have your own little version of a safe space. And that might actually be a church.

I think, look, when I coach young men, the first thing or exercise I do is I say, give me your phone, unlock it, I won't judge you. And we try and find 8 to 12 hours on their phone, which is ridiculously easy between Twitter, TikTok, Coinbase, And then what do you have? You want to lean on your strengths. You have a lot of capital when you're young. It's human capital. You have a lot of time. So we're going to reallocate that capital to a higher ROI.

Smart.

First thing we're going to do is we're going to get fit, right? We're going to, we're going to sign up for classes. I don't care if it's Barry's or an app or the, you know, there's a great fitness, you know, the Alo app has fitness classes. You, you go to whatever it is, F45, We're going to start getting fit. We're going to feel better about ourselves. We're going to feel more confident. Two, we're going to start making some money. If you have a phone, you can make money in this economy. I don't care if you're a Lyft driver or Tasker, TaskRabbit, or whatever they call it. You're going to start figuring— if you go to a construction site and you have any skills at all, you can start at about $20 an hour. I don't care if it's 4 hours a day. You need— the way you make a lot of money is by starting to make some money because you get a taste for flesh and you start thinking, wow, this money thing is awesome. And then the third thing we're gonna do is at least 3 or 4 times a week, we're gonna put ourselves in an environment with strangers in the agency of something bigger than us. It might be church, it might be a nonprofit. Yeah. It might be a sports league, it might be a writing class. You have to be around strangers. And we write down every time you're there, you gotta meet somebody, a potential friend, a potential romantic partner, and you gotta go up and introduce yourself. But being in that company of other people in the agency of something else like church it's just incredibly important. And young men need those guardrails. Young men, one of the things I got at Morgan Stanley, excuse me, was how to read a room. You know, also there's, it's just so important. I think we talk about a code. I'm writing a book on masculinity. I think masculinity can be a decent code for a young man. And I think of a man is supposed to be kind of 3 things, a provider, a protector, and a procreator. And I think all three of those things are wonderful, and men should aspire to all three of those things and break down what it means to be each of them. But the only way you're gonna get there is in the agency of others and being in communities. Men are dangerous when they sequester. When a woman doesn't have a romantic relationship, a lot of times she will pour that energy into her work, into her friends. She finds other places to give and receive love. They're much better at maintaining a social life social network. When a guy doesn't have a prospect of a romantic relationship, he stops showering, he stops looking for a job, right? And I remember this. When I was 23, my first girlfriend told me if I didn't stop smoking so much pot, she was gonna stop having sex with me. And I was really enjoying that part of my life. So I got my shit together and I stopped smoking so much pot. Guys need guardrails. Young men need guardrails. It might be church, it might be the Marines, it might be a girlfriend, it might be Morgan Stanley that told me I couldn't party every night because it was really hard to get up at 6:30 and put on a tie and haul my ass downtown. But without guardrails, men don't demonstrate the same discipline as women in their early years or early adult years. It takes them a while to catch up.

It's such a good point. Yeah. And I think also women out there too, like, what a dumb thing. The whole— I always sort of giggle about the 6'5", trust fund, blue eyes song. 'Cause I'm like, I can't think of anything that would make me more miserable. Like, who cares? Height has no bearing on happiness. Neither does eye color. Sure, money actually decreases misery largely, but I don't think it increases happiness to a huge degree in a relationship. And so I hope at some point women also start pushing back against some of these ideas.

And also— I wouldn't hold your breath.

You know, I think, yeah, you're probably right. But, you know, I have a lot of friends who are my age. I'm a little older. They make money. And at a certain point they start to realize that maybe men don't want to date them as much because they're really narrowing their field of who they will date. And a lot of the women, women these days increasingly seem like, the studies show that they don't want to date men theoretically who have different political views. So I always joke with my cousin because she's super liberal and she can't find a dude, and she's super cute, and she works hard, and I jokingly send her the studies that say, maybe you should date a conservative, 'cause young men her age are increasingly conservative, so it's just math. And also, by the way, polarity seems to work out pretty well for most of us. Maybe we should, my mom and dad had two different political perspectives for our entire lifetime growing up, and now they're married for 40-some-odd years.

Yeah, there's, look, there's something to the yin and the yang. I like that saying that the best marriages are one person loads a dishwasher like a Swiss architect, the other like a raccoon on meth.

I'm the raccoon.

Yeah, I'm the same way. My partner will make me load the dishwasher 'cause she gets angry that I add no value. And I'm like, well, I've always, I've never added any value. Nothing's changed here. But then I load the dishwasher and she'll unload it and reload it.

That's Chris, my husband, ex-military. You're doing it wrong.

Yeah, 100%. You're doing it wrong. But there's, I mean, there's so many reasons. The thing I hate about men getting more conservative and women more progressive, it's yet another reason for people not to hook up. When I was dating, if I looked at all of my dates, all of my relationships, for the life of me, I would not be able to tell you what political affiliation they are.

I know, right?

It's like we've invented another reason for people to decide not to hook up. And what I tell men, the general advice, A lot of young people— how many times have you heard, I have all these great female friends, attractive, nice, high character, professionally, they have their act together, and they can't find a man? That's not true. They can't find a man they want to date. That's true. And my general advice to men is you need to get your act together. You gotta have a plan. What's your plan, right? Every woman is subjectively, or implicitly, or explicitly, is going to try and figure out, does this dude have a plan? You don't need to be a baller. You don't need to a fast car and a beautiful condo, but you need to have a plan. Like, I am thinking about this shit. You need to demonstrate discipline. One way you demonstrate discipline is you're in really good shape. It says, I have my act together. I know how to commit to something. I have, you know, I'm— I take pride in achievement. You got to have a plan, right? You got to be kind. You got to be— you got to demonstrate a certain level level of, I want to call it aggression, but you make the plans. This is where we're going to dinner. You have manners. You pay, right? None of this. I was talking to this guy the other day, like asked him about his date and he said, it's great. And we split the check and I'm like, let me guess, you didn't have sex. I'm like, you're just, no one is ever going to kiss you. They'll all pretend that it's fine. You paying. And she's not going to have sex with you.

I do remember the one date where they did that. Like, to this day, I remember the guy that did that. I was like, you want me to pay? And he was like, sure, you want to? And I was like, yeah.

When women offer, that's the most hollow offer ever. And I know that's sexist, but there's evidence to back that up. It's true. I tell my son, if they're in the company of women and they can't pay, they shouldn't go.

But yeah, or go somewhere for free. Yeah. Or go for a walk. That's totally fair. Go do a workout for a walk, whatever. I get it.

Yeah, whatever it is. But women are generally attracted attracted to men for 3 reasons. The third is kindness. They want someone who's going to be a long-term partner. The second is intellect. If you're funny, really lean into it, because the fastest way to communicate intellect— and men who make good decisions, women are attracted to them because they— if you make good decisions, your kids are more likely to survive. But the number one is your ability to signal resources. Now, the easiest way to signal resources is to show up with a Rolex and a BMW, but also having a plan is signaling future resources, right? So you just have to be thoughtful about those. And what I tell men is you got to have your act together. You got to say, would you want to mate with you? Start, start figuring out, start looking in the mirror, start looking the way you dress, start— I mean, Christ, you have bad breath. I mean, what is it, man? Get your act together. Start becoming more attractive to you and to women. What I coach women around is what I call the second coffee. You can't tell women to lower their standards. That's just But what I say is, if you go on a date and it's not sparks, but maybe it was nice, but you think, oh, there was no chemistry there, give it a second date. 'Cause a lot of couples that have been married found that the woman who's much finer filter, she started to find, he was able to demonstrate excellence over the medium term and she fell for him. Second coffee. Like, unless it's just awful or it just not, you know, I mean, I'm not gonna tell anyone, I can't tell anyone to lower the standards, but give it a second coffee. You just don't know. And then the other thing I tell all young people, your default setting is yes. I have some friends going out. Yes, I'll come. Oh, there's a dinner. Oh, there's a lame corporate event. Yes, yes, yes. Return eye contact. And what I tell men is approach strangers. And if you express romantic interest or you go up to someone and they're not interested, You're both gonna be fine. You're both gonna be fine. And men get a lot of mixed signals in the professional world around the difference, around where contact could be harassment. And I'm like, if you don't know the difference between expressing interest and harassing somebody, you have bigger problems. But something we don't like to talk about, 1 in 3 relationships begin at work. And 99% of them are consensual. And there's been some horrific abuses of power in the workplace. Those people should be fired or worse, but it's okay to meet people at work. There's been 12 marriages at the companies I've started. I see that as a mitzvah. I think it's a wonderful thing. I love that. So anyways, I'm worried the young people, we aren't creating the economic stability, the economic prosperity, or even inventing the third spaces, whether it's church, national service, parks, clubs, leagues, nonprofits, a chance for them to meet, a chance for them to get together and quote unquote fall in love. And we're regressing to a more primal vision of mating where a small number of men get to procreate. 80% of women have procreated. It's only 40% of men throughout history. And we're moving back.

80% of—

say that again. 80% of women have procreated, have had a child, and 40% of men— only 40% of men have, because generally speaking, The middle class is an accident. A group of men in the middle who are attractive to women is an accident. It happened in World War II. 7 men came home from war. They demonstrated excellence. They were in uniform, they were in good shape, and the government flushed a bunch of money into their pockets with the GI Bill, the National Highway Act. So there were a lot of very attractive men coming home and it started the baby boom and these loving, supportive, confident households created this prosperity and this progressive outlook. We're like, let's give women a shot. Let's give non-whites a shot. Everybody, this, this prosperity and rights shoved into the middle class is such a wonderful thing. We should shove it into as many corners as possible. That's the greatest innovation in history. But it started with young people having more economic opportunity and quite frankly, a group of men that were more attractive to potential mates. And what we have in our society right now, unfortunately, is too many men who are just not economically or emotionally viable.

Yeah, it's beautiful. What a beautiful disaster. I think where I kind of want to end is maybe not the most of high notes, but I think important to note. I love some of your writing on this. A little wrap up here. Let's talk about another boom, not the baby boom, but the LBO boom and what happened with leveraged buyouts in this country and what happened with sort of the few owning much, because I don't think the average person quite realizes what's happened right underneath our nose?

Sure. I look at it mostly through the lens of— so I don't think— I'm not one of these people that thinks all private equity and buyout firms has been bad because I know a lot of dentists and people who own lawn care and people who own chiropractic clinics who have found liquidity by a private equity firm coming in and trying to consolidate it, consolidate the backend. So I think capital coming into the market is actually a good thing for people. Where I see a concentration of power is across industry. One firm controls two-thirds of all social media. One firm controls 93% of the $300 billion search market. There's 3 chicken companies that control like 80% of chicken. We have allowed so much concentration of power that the rents they can charge on consumers, on marketers, go up every year. So Amazon 20 years ago, if you were a third-party marketer or third-party reseller, selling your products on Amazon, they took about 20% of your gross dollar volume. Now they take 45% because they kind of own the market. If you don't sell on Amazon, you're kind of not selling online. So this concentration of power that has raised rents across corporate America and quite frankly raised rents across parents. I know TikTok's bad, I know Snap's bad. Like how do I tell my kid to communicate with his friends back home if I get him off Snap? That's it. You know what? These, these companies have so much power. I'm gonna tell my kid not to have an iPhone. So there's so much concentration of power that the rents have gotten greater and greater and greater. So I go more towards antitrust. I think there needs to be a lot of breakups. It's good for shareholders. When AT&T was broken up into the 7 Baby Bells, all 7 of those companies were worth more than the original AT&T within 10 years. And Google hasn't really innovated. Search isn't much different than it was 10 years ago because they haven't needed to. They have 93% share. They buy any company that threatens them.

Microsoft too, with the suite of products. I mean, they just basically recreate any product that comes out there in the marketplace that they can put inside of a Microsoft suite.

That's right. And they're a perfect example of the power of antitrust because in '99 they were found guilty of monopoly abuse and they were ordered to break up. And even though they overturned the ruling, they stopped bundling and putting companies out of business. So if there hadn't been a DOJ ruling against Microsoft in '99, 1999, we'd all be saying, I don't know, Bing it. Google is a function of antitrust. So the ability, once companies get too big, breaking them up and auctioning the environment, you know, there's more people, the rents for labor go up, employees do better 'cause there's more people bidding on their time, there's more tax revenue. Shareholders traditionally do well. PayPal used to be owned by eBay and they spun it. It's now worth, I think, 15 times what eBay is worth. So tax, tax, taxes, more taxes, more entrepreneurship, higher salaries, more shareholder value. The only person that loses is the CEO who generally wants to sit on the Iron Throne of all 7 realms, not just Westeros. So I would argue the way to oxygenate the market would be to go through industry by industry and break up, you know, launching a tech company is really difficult right now. There's a lot of bigger players. And there's just a concentration of power across industry that is very hard to break into. And they donate a lot of money to Washington. There's regulatory capture. Why do I have to buy insurance to get a mortgage? 'Cause they're in bed with each other, right? So I think there's a lot that can be done to make make small business and bring down the costs for regular consumers through antitrust. The private equity market, I'm of two minds. Is there abuses when big players come in? Yes. But at the same time, I like a lot of capital in the market bidding on entrepreneurs' businesses. You know, there's a person on the other end of that, that pool maintenance company that just got bought. His son doesn't want to go into it. Right. And he's got a nice little business and a private equity shop comes in and says, okay, I'll pay $1 million for your business. You work here for 4 years and you have a way out. So I'm of two minds and I work with a lot of private equity firms and I've generally found, generally found that they're good people trying to, you know, who pay well. So I can understand that there's some situations where they come into a company levered up in debt, let it go out of business. Raid the employee pension fund. I find a lot of that is a bit made for news, for the, you know, business section of the New York Times. I don't think they're as mendacious as people think. Now, venture capitalists, I think that's another story. Yeah. So I, you know, I think there's some nuance there, but generally speaking, I'm a fan of capital coming into the small business market.

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I also think like, But to your point in the very beginning, everybody's looking for a way to make more with less risk. And so I think the concern is always not that private equity is evil or even that Google and all of them are evil. It's just how do we make sure that our perverse incentives of always wanting to win individually do not overcome everything else. And so I get concerned when I see private equity go from owning 4% of the private businesses to 20% over a, depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a 10 and 12-year period. But man, you could say the Big Four are much more of an instigator on the public market than the private equity companies are on the private market.

7 companies are responsible for a third of the returns. One company, Apple, is worth more than the entire UK stock market. I mean, there is— we have this illusion that the stock market is really robust. I know there's 7 companies that are driving the majority of the return. If you tell me what stocks you have, I mean, if Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, and I don't know if the other one's Microsoft, if you don't own one of those 7 stocks, you've underperformed the market and your returns are probably flat.

What do you think about people who say, like, the argument today is like, you know, Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock own, you know, let's call it 80% of the S&P and 40% of the broad market. It, but then people will say, but they're passive, they're passive investors. What do you think about that? Do you think they actually change governance on most of our companies in the, in the US because they own them, or are they truly passive?

It's a really interesting question. So concentration of ownership is just a bad, is just bad to begin with. Although I would argue that those industries, I mean, it's an interesting question. So there's two sides to it. I love low-cost index funds. I— you want to have some fun. Everybody believes they're smarter than your average bear. I'm not immune. I stock pick. But what I would tell young people is 70% of any of your savings— well, 99% of your savings is going to come from money you can't touch, whether it's equity or things that automatically go into a savings account. Low-cost index funds. The— I work with the brightest people in finance. I've advised the most prestigious VCs, private equity funds. And my sum net conclusion is no one has any idea. And the VCs that outperform are the ones that get better deal flow. But if you took the entire alternative investments industry, any logo on CNBC, anyone that advertises, any hedge fund, anywhere, it's essentially a grift. And what they, if you look at their performance, they've exactly underperformed the S&P by the amount of their fees. Exactly. So Vanguard low-cost SPY index funds, I absolutely think that's the way to go. Now, whether those funds have become so big that they dictate corporate governance and they're passive, so they don't create enough churn with management, I don't know. I mean, that's an— it's an interesting theory how they've— maybe they've created a stasis in the market. Hmm. I mean, that's an interesting question. I don't have a viewpoint. My— where I take from these is I tell people, they're like, oh, is it too late to buy NVIDIA? I'm like, I don't know, but it's not too late to buy an index fund., and your 27 cents on the dollar are gonna go into the Magnificent Seven. So if they double, you're fine. But if the other 493 companies have their day in the sun, you're gonna get to participate. And the market, especially in America, I, I wonder if emerging markets are about to finally have their day in the sun 'cause the US market is actually pretty expensive. But along the lines of index or diversification, I would even suggest like index funds that have some exposure to foreign markets now. 'cause the US market looks historically expensive, but you don't need to be a hero. It's like what John Bogle from Vanguard said, you don't need to find the needle in the haystack, buy the whole goddamn haystack. And the amazing thing about humanity is that with population growth and innovation and technology, generally speaking, over the medium and long term, we become more productive and the market goes up and to the right. So yeah, pretend you know more than everyone else, Have an expensive lesson figuring out you don't. Take a third, buy Dogecoin or buy whatever it is, you know, buy the new AI company. Put 70% into, and this is the key, low-cost index funds. People, you're in this business, people don't realize how much of the returns are eaten up by fees.

No, 'cause they hide 'em and they think it's just the expense ratio.

Well, 2%, that doesn't sound bad. That's a 30-year return.

Yeah, 100%. And then you don't add the fund admin fees and anything you have inside of it. Yeah, I totally agree. I think Vanguard's a great fund. Great place to invest, an awful place to work, unless you don't really like working that hard. Did you work there? Yeah, it's my first, it's socialism in a company. You know, there's no meritocracy. It's kind of like if you want to progress in the military, they go, cool, 3 years, like you're at this level. And then at 3 years you can go somewhere else. That was my experience. It was a long time ago. That was right outta college. And you know, when you're young and dumb, you're young and dumb. So I don't know how much of that was just like, I'm really good. And really I was an idiot who knew nothing. But I much preferred Goldman, even though it was hard and I was scared I was going to get fired all the time. But Vanguard's great because you can't get fired unless you like cuss in an email or maybe have like some version of harassment. You get a company match in your 401(k) that's really aggressive, right? They never fire anybody and you can climb the ladder as long as you stay there forever. But you can't go fast. And that never worked that well for me.

But that— those are different cultures and there's people for each of those cultures. 100%. Right. And I generally find the companies— it's proximity bias because I'm around very ambitious young people being at a business school.

And you're in New York versus Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Yeah. And what I found is that the best companies that really outperform the market have the culture of the following: we own your ass. You're going to have no life. But this is what we're gonna do. If you wanna go flat out, we're gonna let you run as fast as you can. And we have 30-year-olds here making a million bucks. And we don't look at 'em and go, your time will come. You'll be VP at 45. Don't worry. Roger's above you and he's been here 20. Like, you wanna go flat out? We'll go as fast as you can run. But it's not balance, it's not paternity leave, it's not pet bereavement leave, it's not, it's the implicit agreement is if you go flat out here and you're good and you're talented and you devote your life to work, which is not for everybody, I'm gonna put you where your parents were at 50 at 30. And there's a lot of people who want that culture. They're like, I wanna go flat out, I want economic security, I'll have more balance when I'm older. There's also a lot of other people who are like, no, I wanna work to live. I wanna have kids. I wanna have healthy relationships. I wanna spend time with my parents. I wanna be fit. I wanna have weekends and maybe in the summer take the, you know, Friday off and go to the lake.

They're probably happier.

Good. Yeah, they are probably happier. There's nothing wrong with that. And then like I worked at, one of my first consulting clients was Levi Strauss and Company. They were very maternal. It was summer Fridays, mental health counseling. I mean, really like cared about their employees. And Morgan Stanley was like, shut the fuck up. We'll give you feedback once a year and it's called a check. And you'll find out what your bonus was when it hits your bank account. We didn't even get reviews.

I remember that too.

You got a number.

I remember when they were like, you get a bonus. You're like, how do you calculate it? Excuse me? Don't ask how you calculated this. Now my employees are like, can you please tell me how much you make and when? I'm like, what? Also good for you guys that you have the balls to ask this stuff.

Quarterly reviews and yeah, the world's changed probably for the better. But the majority of the people I'm around, young people want to go flat out. And the companies that usually outperform the market are the ones that create that culture around going kind of the ultimate arbitrage in our economy is fossil fuels. But the second of that is finding young, super hardworking, super talented people who are better with technology and paying them 30% of what you're paying Bob, who's a 40-year-old. And they do 90— they add 90% of the value. They're less mature. They're not very good managers. They're super smart. They don't have dogs or kids, so they're willing to kind of work all the time. That's the ultimate economic arbitrage in corporate America. And the companies that attract that secret sauce, that is very talented young people, outperform everyone else.

That's such a good point. Yeah. Today Tanner was like, oh yeah, we've got some free time. We have 23 minutes in between meetings. We were giggling. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what we want. Okay. Last question. Elon Musk. Do you not like the guy? You guys get at it at Twitter. Did he really call you insufferable? Did you just put that on a drift? What do we think about Elon?

No, he called me an insufferable numbskull. On Twitter?

Uh, yeah. Did you talk back to him?

I don't even remember. I, I don't remember what I was saying.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not a big deal and he's actually reached out to me through a friend saying we should get together.

Um, I like that.

Yeah.

I like a little bit of, I think you gotta push back even on the biggest billionaires and they can handle it and they'll probably push back too. Yeah.

Look, um, the problem is we're in a culture where we've decided if someone or a company is a net positive, if I had a button that Elon Musk would have to go back to South Africa, I wouldn't push that button. I think he's been a net good for the world, uh, inspired the EV race, the space— I mean, seeing that rocket, that booster rocket captured on it as it's falling, that shit's just inspiring. But at the same time, the word— the problem with the word a net good for society is the word net. I also think he should be held accountable for his coarseness and his cruelty. I don't think you attain that level of power such that that you cannot pay people their legally obligated severance. I don't think you accuse an employee of being a sex criminal such that that employee has to move their house. I think he's not a very good role model for men. I don't think living alone with none of your 12 children by 3 women with a loaded gun next to your bed is what men should aspire to. So, you know, I think it's just sort of a Greek tragedy. I, I think he's going to move the world forward But I think, quite frankly, being coarse and cruel and super into ketamine, I don't think that's something young men should aspire to. So should he be recognized for his achievements? Yes. Should he also be held accountable? And should we be critical of him on the things that where I don't think he's living up to his blessings?

Yeah.

And so, but look, I don't think he thinks a lot about me, nor should he, but I don't know. You know, I, I, like, the more generally, the people are most patriotic are the ones who've invested most in our nation, and that's veterans. They're the most patriotic. The thing I find so distressed, distressing about guys like Elon Musk and generally what I'll call this tech bro community is I think they're the most blessed Americans.

There's—

we're the most blessed people on the planet because if you look at a map, if you go up the western coast, you start at San Diego, Qualcomm, and you go up to LA, you get SpaceX and Snap, and you keep going north, you get Salesforce and Meta and Alphabet, and you keep going north, you get Amazon and OpenAI and Microsoft. And then it stops when you hit the Canadian border. Lululemon maybe in Vancouver. And then you go down to San Diego and it stops and you gotta go another 5,000 kilometers until you get to MercadoLibre. Maybe there's something about being in America that has really helped you. And I find these are the first people to shitpost America. So it's like, boss, you don't realize a lot of your success is not your fault. It's the success of other Americans. Every one of these companies is built on a technology that was funded by American middle-class taxpayers, whether it was DARPA, whether Elon Musk got $350 million tax-free loan. He hates subsidies, but he was there for it when we gave him a low-interest $350 million loan California, the charging stations are being built out by taxpayers. DARPA, the internet, Netflix was built on net neutrality funded by California and the other 49 states, taxpayers. And yet they seem to just dislike America once they have leveraged the shit out of it. And I just find it obnoxious.

I think that's a good pushback. My husband is a contractor still for the Defense Innovation Unit at the Department of Defense in their AI portfolio. And runs the commercial portion. A lot of what you talk about of us versus China, which is real, not like us versus the Chinese, but the actual Chinese government, only happens because the government is willing to fund a bunch of initiatives in Silicon Valley and in venture capital that venture capitalists would not.

No way. They wouldn't get near it.

They wouldn't get near it. You and I both know a lot of people who are full-time venture capitalists. I want to come back in my next life is one because I don't think the hard, the real hard work is being the founders doing the ridiculously hard masochistic thing that is building a business out of nothing. And I also think, you know, being a government worker when you have to go to war in a foreign land, which is our soldiers. So I agree with you. All right. This is incredible. Thank you for being here today. This was so interesting. I learned a ton and And I know that everybody probably knows where to find you, but if I haven't said it before, No Mercy, No Malice, probably my favorite newsletter. Yeah, incredible newsletter overall. And I listened to Adrift in probably like 3 days on audiobook. And then I bought actually the real book too, because the graphics are so incredible. And I think it's a— even if people don't read books today, which is more normal, like being able to understand the world through those graphs is very easy and digestible. So if you haven't read Scott's new book Adrift, it's really good, as are all the rest. Thank you so much for being on this podcast.

Congrats on your success.

Yeah, well, you know, we'll see how long it lasts. All right, guys, I think that's a wrap.

Good.

Thanks, everybody. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up.

Spring's calling.

Ross, work your magic.